21 Nov 2008

Peter Hook's forthright honesty comes through loud and clear in a set of 5 video interviews for MagicRPM.com. (Conducted during the recent Peter Hook & Section 25 tour.) Titled 'Saga New Order', and running about 25 minutes in total, Hook touches on subjects as varied as the woulda shoulda coulda parameters of the recent New Order Rhino remasters, truly knowing your bandmates of 30 years, the best (& worst) New Order videos, Happy Mondays thwarted thieving, his problems with 1 Top Class Manager, and, er, David Hasselhoff.

In the grey days of late 1970s post-punk Manchester, youth culture was a serious affair: every musical performance was measured mostly by the conviction of its delivery. The term 'New Wave' opened up free vistas where acquired skills could once again be exercised after punk's monochrome blur. It could be applied to anything from a James 'Blood' Ulmer record to the latest Throbbing Gristle release, Magazine to Swell Maps. Move outside that terrain into Sun Ra, Parliament, Frank Sinatra and Martin Denny, and your options were suddenly without limit...

Then came Tony Wilson's Factory Club (at the Russell Club in Hulme) offering an open invitation to experiment that was taken up when Ken Hollings, Howard Walmsley, Eddie Sherwood and a few others decided to make some noise to accompany their 16mm silent epic Biting Tongues. A further performance followed a few weeks later, when Colin Seddon and Graham Massey disbanded their Post Natals project and joined up. The film itself, a flashing series of negative images, became a memory; the name remained.